Tourism and Environmental Pollution: Evidence from the One Belt One Road Provinces of Western China

The rapid economic development of China and the industrial shift from its eastern to western provinces have resulted in significant negative impacts on the environment. Recently, tourism has emerged as an alternative for economic and environmental development, but it is a double-edged sword. Without the required measures to protect environment, the opportunity cost of tourism is environmental degradation. The western part of China holds a significant advantage for the development of travel and tourism (T&T), due to One Belt One Road (OBOR), unique ancient culture and spectacular variety of natural scenic spots. This region is among the less explored and less developed, but important, parts of China. Taking this point into consideration, this paper aims to examine the impact of tourism on the environmental pollution of five provinces located in the heart of OBOR over the period of 1991–2016. To explore this link, we used the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) approach and Gregory-Hansen test for robustness check. We applied the Zivot-Andrews unit root test to deal with structural breaks in data. Our results confirm a negative impact of tourism on environment for Ningxia, Qinghai, Gansu, and Shanxi. However, tourism improves the environmental quality of Xinjiang. The negative impact of energy consumption and GDP growth is significant than tourism. Our findings suggest that the relationship varies for different provinces in the same region depending on the specific provincial features and government policies. Furthermore, tourism development has great potential to improve the economic and environmental sustainability in these provinces.

[1]  Obaid ur Rehman,et al.  Energy and Ecological Sustainability: Challenges and Panoramas in Belt and Road Initiative Countries , 2018, Sustainability.

[2]  S. Katircioğlu,et al.  Testing the tourism-induced EKC hypothesis: The case of Singapore , 2014 .

[3]  M. Pablo-Romero,et al.  Relationships between Tourism and Hospitality Sector Electricity Consumption in Spanish Provinces (1999–2013) , 2017 .

[4]  Bruce E. Hansen,et al.  Tests for Cointegration in Models with Regime and Trend Shifts , 2009 .

[5]  Muhammad Shahbaz,et al.  Does tourism degrade environmental quality? A comparative study of Eastern and Western European Union , 2017 .

[6]  Aviral Kumar Tiwari,et al.  Tourism, Energy Consumption and Climate Change in OECD Countries , 2013 .

[7]  Bin Wang,et al.  Car Tourism in Xinjiang: The Mediation Effect of Perceived Value and Tourist Satisfaction on the Relationship between Destination Image and Loyalty , 2016 .

[8]  Daniel W.M. Chan,et al.  A scientometric review of global research on sustainability and sustainable development , 2018 .

[9]  P. Perron,et al.  Testing For A Unit Root In A Time Series With A Changing Mean , 1990 .

[10]  Muhammad Shahbaz,et al.  Tourism development, energy consumption and Environmental Kuznets Curve: trivariate analysis in the panel of developed and developing countries. , 2016 .

[11]  Mete Feridun,et al.  Estimating tourism-induced energy consumption and CO2 emissions: The case of Cyprus , 2014 .

[12]  Yiping Huang,et al.  Understanding China's Belt & Road Initiative: Motivation, framework and assessment , 2016 .

[13]  Zhongliang Wang,et al.  Quantifying direct and indirect carbon dioxide emissions of the Chinese tourism industry , 2016 .

[14]  D. Andrews,et al.  Further Evidence on the Great Crash, the Oil-Price Shock, and the Unit-Root Hypothesis , 1992 .

[15]  Jing Gao,et al.  Exploring the effects of international tourism on China's economic growth, energy consumption and environmental pollution: Evidence from a regional panel analysis , 2016 .

[16]  Waqas Amin,et al.  Structural changes, energy consumption and carbon emissions in China: Empirical evidence from ARDL bound testing model , 2018, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics.

[17]  Xiao-ping Qiu,et al.  Tourism Eco-Efficiency Measurement, Characteristics, and Its Influence Factors in China , 2017 .

[18]  Y. Lim,et al.  A decomposition analysis of CO2 emissions: evidence from Malaysia’s tourism industry , 2016 .

[19]  Xia Cao.  Challenges and potential improvements in the policy and regulatory framework for sustainable tourism planning in China: the case of Shanxi Province , 2015 .

[20]  J. Zhan,et al.  Environmental cost and pollution risk caused by the industrial transfer in Qinghai Province , 2014, Frontiers of Earth Science.

[21]  I. Ozturk.  The relationships among tourism development, energy demand, and growth factors in developed and developing countries , 2016 .

[22]  Javier Rey-Maquieira,et al.  Tourism and solid waste generation in Europe: A panel data assessment of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. , 2015, Waste management.

[23]  Bruce E. Hansen,et al.  Residual-based tests for cointegration in models with regime shifts , 1996 .

[24]  Jing Xu,et al.  Self-driving tourism induced carbon emission flows and its determinants in well-developed regions: A case study of Jiangsu Province, China , 2018, Journal of Cleaner Production.

[25]  Mehdi Ben Jebli,et al.  The dynamic causal links between CO2 emissions from transport, real GDP, energy use and international tourism , 2018 .

[26]  Luis Lopez,et al.  Quantifying Spanish tourism's carbon footprint: the contributions of residents and visitors: a longitudinal study , 2015 .

[27]  Pu Wu,et al.  The measurement and comparative study of carbon dioxide emissions from tourism in typical provinces in China , 2015 .

[28]  Can Tansel Tuğcu,et al.  The impact of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on tourism: Does the source of emission matter? , 2018 .

[29]  K. Bi,et al.  Decoupling indicators of CO2 emissions from the tourism industry in China: 1990–2012 , 2014 .

[30]  Bin Chen,et al.  The Impacts of Environmental Regulation on Industrial Activities: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment in Chinese Prefectures , 2017 .

[31]  Yongtao Tan,et al.  Identifying the key impact factors of carbon emission in China: Results from a largely expanded pool of potential impact factors , 2018 .

[32]  Peter C. B. Phillips,et al.  Statistical Inference in Instrumental Variables Regression with I(1) Processes , 1990 .

[33]  P. Ding,et al.  Research on environmental impacts of tourism in China: progress and prospect. , 2011, Journal of environmental management.

[34]  Obaid ur Rehman,et al.  Testing EKC hypothesis with energy and sustainable development challenges: a fresh evidence from belt and road initiative economies , 2018, Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

[35]  Jia Liu,et al.  Tourism eco-efficiency of Chinese coastal cities – Analysis based on the DEA-Tobit model , 2017 .

[36]  Normaz Wana Ismail,et al.  Tourism and CO2 emissions nexus in Southeast Asia: new evidence from panel estimation , 2017, Environment, Development and Sustainability.

[37]  B. Xue,et al.  Quantifying the Economy-Environment Interactions in Tourism: Case of Gansu Province, China , 2018 .

[38]  M. Nurunnabi,et al.  Tourism development, energy consumption and environmental quality in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco: a trivariate analysis , 2019 .

[39]  M. Jin,et al.  The dynamic coordinated development of a regional environment-tourism-economy system: a case study from western Hunan Province, China. , 2014 .

[40]  M. Azam,et al.  Effect of tourism on environmental pollution: Further evidence from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand , 2018, Journal of Cleaner Production.

[41]  John J. Pigram,et al.  Environmental implications of tourism development , 1980 .